Is your company confusing social
distribution with content effectiveness? As more and more companies are
expanding their social, particularly into the realm of social media, it is
becoming crucial to understand the metrics. Content Marketing Institute states
that, “metrics such as shares, re-tweets, and views are often the easiest and
most obvious to gather, but they may be the most deceptive and unreliable when
evaluating whether your content is genuinely making a difference.”

The
point of social is to build a relationship with your customers, to market your
brand, but more importantly to increase your ROI, meaning conversion to an
increase in sales. Marketers these days may be tracking metrics, but you need
to be sure they are tracking the right metrics. For example, engagement used to
mean something. It meant capturing, holding attention, and interacting with
customers, but now with social media, engagement may just mean a “like”, a “re-tweet”,
or an open.

According
to The Fournaise Marketing Group, 76% of marketers use the wrong KPIs and
metrics to assess the effectiveness of their strategies. And most marketers are
still considering market effectiveness to be about awareness (74%) and/or
engagement (71%). About 86% believe engagement was a form of conversion. But
just think, are customers scrolling through your social content and then
“liking” your page or “re-tweeting” your content but then never buying the
product?

Here are four of the worst social metrics, since they do not
necessarily imply conversion:

1.Shares:
Whether this means re-tweeting on Twitter, posting on your Facebook wall or
Instagram page, sharing content does not reflect the impact of the social media
platform on conversion rate. In fact, as of September, Twitter removed the
share counts from its widgets, buttons, and API because the share count was
“never an accurate measure of social engagement with the content.” Your
customer shared something you posted on social media, so what! A better metric
would be to track if whatever you posted and the customer shared then resulted
in a sale as a direct effect of the content posted.

2.Views on
Facebook: On Facebook, if a customer is slowly scrolling through their feed
and scroll upon a video, the video posted begins silently streaming and within
three seconds, Facebook counts it as a view. But did your customer even see the
video? Did they watch it? Most likely not, they were probably scrolling slowly
and they might have looked away from the screen or if you are lucky they may
have briefly saw it. YouTube, however, only counts a view after approximately
30 seconds, reducing the number of accidental views or bounces. But even this
is a flawed metric. How many viewers made it to the end of the video? So, when
marketers are sending metrics to you about number of video views, at least now
you are educated about what this means and can ask more questions to get better
metrics.

3.“Likes”
on all social media platforms: As you may know, Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, Pinterest, and even LinkedIn have ways for you to “like” content
shared. But what do these “likes” mean? You may be thinking well even if a like
is an inaccurate measure of content effectiveness at least it is still better
than no measure at all. To your point, numbers don’t lie, but they do not tell
the whole truth. Presenting the number of “likes” to your boss in reality means
nothing. For starters, you aren’t comparing apples-to-apples. What if you have
more followers on Instagram than the number of friends you have on Facebook?
Then coincidentally you are already not able to reach as many people on
Facebook. So if you post one piece of content on Instagram that gets more “likes”
than a different post on Facebook how are you able to compare? Additionally,
how many of these “likes” contributed to your bottom-line? Was it a direct
correlation to a sale? Likely, just by presenting these “likes” you did not ask
these questions and the metric “like” here means nothing.

4.Opens for
email: You know those automatic emails that get generated daily and sent to
your entire address book? Even if you are requesting a read receipt from the
email sent, sometimes the email doesn’t even get opened. The reader may be able
to view it in their side viewing panel and then click “yes to send read
receipt.” And even if the email was opened, within seconds it might be deleted
and therefore there was no conversion. Great, you sent 100,000 emails that day
and 95% of them were opened, but what was the effect on your company? This is
another useless metric that needs to be avoided.

It is important to not hide behind numbers that are flawed,
inaccurate, inconsistent, or meaningless. Social can be a great way to share
content and while we are not advising you to stop distributing content, we do
caution you about the types of metrics you are analyzing. Stop to think if the
metrics being measured really show insight into content effectiveness and
translate directly to your bottom-line, if not, you have to take the numbers
for what they really are, just numbers that don’t say anything about your ROI.

Strategic Sourceror

StrategicSourceror.com is a leading industry blog that focuses on providing news, tips, and best practices for a variety of procurement, supply chain, and strategic sourcing categories.

This site is owned and operated by Source One Management Services, LLC; the leading consultancy providing strategic sourcing resources, procurement advisory consulting and procurement support services to hundreds of companies.

Continue to visit StrategicSourceror for your supply chain and procurement news and to see the latest tips, advise, and rants from the analysts, consultants, and category managers from Source One.

Thank you for your readership!

About Source One

Source One Management Services, LLC is a leading procurement services provider. Since 1992, Source One has been providing companies in all industries with sourcing services including BPO, Benchmarking, Spend Analysis, Category Support, and RFX Management.